But this site is really about what I do on my own, as
MikeRoTheatre. (Get it?) In my first season, I performed
Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), Gulliver's Travels, Zeus
Remembers, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table, and Lessons of
Darkness, a selection of my own ghost stories, which I did just before
Christmas 2000 in Winterslow near Salisbury (where I live) and early in
2001 at the Talking Heads pub in Portswood, Southampton (where I used to
teach German at the University, until I was lucky enough to be able to
take early retirement and devote myself to literature, theatre and other
cultural activities.) My first one-man show was one I inherited from
someone else: Old Herbaceous, in which I played an eighty-year-old
gardener. I did it in Winterslow Village Hall, in aid of a charitable
project which the village was supporting, and again in the bar of the
Nuffield Theatre at Southampton University, in aid of Southampton
University Players, whose chairperson I was for some years, during which
time I adapted, directed and acted (as Charles Dickens and various other
minor characters) in David Copperfield at the Nuffield Theatre (not just
in the bar!) and also directed an all-female Julia Caesar. Details of my
"stage career" can be found on one of the link pages below. I have also
performed Three Men at Milton Abbey School in Dorset and done workshops at
Sherborne School for Girls (in Dorset) on commedia dell'arte and Molière,
and on Greek Drama at Coombe School for Girls in New Malden, Surrey.
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The autumn 2001 to autumn 2002 programme included a performance of Three Men in a Boat in the Nuffield Theatre on December 9th at 8 p.m. (in aid of Southampton University Players) and The Poor Player, by Franz Grillparzer and translated by me - a treasure of Austrian literature, totally unknown in the English-speaking world, performed June 27th 2002 in the Austrian Cultural Institute, Rutland Gate, London. Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table (real improvised storytelling) was performed in the Nuffield Theatre Gallery Restaurant on Sunday June 30th in the presence of John Denham, M.P., and seventy or so other people, and I repeated the first half of it (inasmuch as you ever “repeat” a story that you tell) in St Michael’s Church, Southampton, on Saturday 16th November, as part of the Southampton Storytelling Festival – visit their website http://www.storyclub.org.uk GHOSTS OF CHANCE (my own
ghost stories, selected from the ones on the website below, in the
Nuffield Gallery Restaurant, on Sunday, December 1st was a kind
of succès d’estime, but didn’t have many bums on seats, and since then
I’ve been acting for Winterslow Drama Group (The Inspector in Priestley’s
An Inspector Calls, and a
lecherous “Russian” director in Simon Brett’s Murder in Play) and for
Southampton University Players (Jarge in a modern mummers’ play, and at
present a seafaring rat!) and telling stories... for which, see the storyteller
link above... | |
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